I see the anthropic principle as yet another attempt to stage a Ptolemaic counterrevolution, aiming
to put human minds back at the center of reality. This attempt is no more successful than its many
predecessors, including Kant's theory of knowledge, Husserl's phenomenology, Buddhist mysticism,
New Age wishful spirituality, postmodernism, the Wittgensteinian defense of everyday concepts, and
consciousness-based interpretations of quantum mechanics. Rejecting idealism and the lure of
dualism, we need to comprehend the insights of physics, biology, and neuroscience that our minds are
just another physical process in a vast universe. The cyclic theory shows how this universe might
have come into existence through a physical mechanism, without generating spurious reassurance
about the centrality of human thinking to reality. Only in the past few hundred thousand years, out of
the many billions of years that the universe has existed, have human minds been around to interpret
reality. We have no way of ever knowing whether other kinds of minds evolved in previous cycles of
expansion before our universe was formed, or whether new kinds will evolve in future cycles
trillions of years from now.